Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Reid.
I share the sentiment of my colleague, Mr. Richards, and I want to hearken back to the election campaign where the now government, the Liberal Party, at the time made all kinds of promises, highfalutin, high-sounding promises, about how they were going to change the relationship between committees and Parliament. Committees were going to be respected. Committees were not going to be browbeaten by the government to toe the party line, and parliamentary secretaries weren't going to sit on the committee and direct things.
Most importantly, they said they were going to bring back the independence of committees as they were originally conceived when the parliamentary system was first thought of. That was the promise. I tell you it's been a struggle to recognize where that's been honoured. It has in a few occasions and I have said publicly that's a good thing.
My favourite part of being an MP, other than being in my riding with my constituents, here on the Hill is committee work. I love doing committee work. I've gone out of my way, when the government has shown some respect and lived up to what they promised, to say so in the hope that would further it and continue it. This is the antithesis of that.
If I can, Chair, I also want to share my thoughts with Mr. Richards in that I agree with him and I'll defer at any moment to give Mr. Simms the floor, since I'm about to talk about him. I'll give him that. I have great respect for Mr. Simms, and that's why I agree with Mr. Richards that I don't believe that this really is Mr. Simms' idea. If he wants to take complete ownership of it, that's fine, but I think we all know that it's kind of a poor ruse. This is from on high. This is directly out of the Prime Minister's Office, marching orders given to the House leader and then all the way down to here at the committee.
Again, that was not supposed to be the way this government was going to be with committees. That's why I'm so furious at this, because this was a good thing that the government was saying. I made it very clear that if we couldn't win—I wanted us to win—then I did want them to win. I liked a lot of the things that they were talking about. A lot of them were the same things as us, like breathing more democracy into this place and bringing back a lot of the traditions and respect that used to be here that got lost over the last decade—all good things.
So what happened? Because there's no goodwill. I'm sorry, my friend said he was doing this out of goodwill but I don't see any. Had there been goodwill, this would have started maybe at the House leaders' level where they would have said, look, here's what we're considering doing. How do you feel about that? It would have worked its way through and found a way to the committee. We'd have been seized of it in a way where it would be, “This is something we'd like you to take a look at in a respectful kind of way”, and then we would go about, with the steering committee, putting together what a plan might look like. That's how we would do that and that's how we've been trying to function.
I have to tell you it feels like I'm back in the last Parliament. This is the kind of nonsense we used to face with the Harper government every bloody day at every bloody committee. It was supposed to be different. This doesn't feel different. The government tried to bring in some of these changes. You know, context matters. There was government motion number six, an odious piece of parliamentary business if ever there was any, and clearly enough it was, because ultimately the government had to back down, big time back down.
Then, as Mr. Richards has said, we took a look at some of these issues—not all of them but some of them—in the family-friendly Parliament review we did, and some of these things were rejected. Now they're back, not for consideration or for discussion as they're putting it. Make no mistake, this is being served up to be rammed through.
I haven't heard the government talk about what we're going to do about the issue of the normal history of all-party agreement on these things. I think this would be a great opportunity to reintroduce the Cullen model. It worked very well in democratic reform and this is somewhat similar. We're dealing with rules that affect all of us. We want to give everybody an opportunity to have input. You try to find compromise where you can or at the very least reach majority with more than one party.
The Cullen model in the Special Committee on Electoral Reform gave us that opportunity. The government hasn't talked about that at all right now.
I have to agree with Mr. Richards, again, who had the opportunity to speak first and lay out some of these important issues. It looks like the government is prepared to change the rules of our House using their majority. How the hell is that fair? How does that even come anywhere near what you promised in the campaign? Every one of you promised that you were going to be different, and Canadians bought it and gave you a huge majority. Here we are now, facing Harper 2.0. This is really serious.
We have, as part of our mandate, a job to review the Standing Orders anyway. It's part of our mandate during this Parliament. Parliament did theirs, and they did it within 90 days. We have a mandate that we're supposed to review the Standing Orders. Normally that's done in a collegial fashion. We're not doing that. The government has reached in, cherry-picked certain things it wants, and stuffed them into this motion. From all accounts, it looks like they are prepared to just ram, ram, ram. That's just Harper, Harper, Harper.
Not only that, to add insult to injury, we haven't even had a chance to take it to caucus yet. The discussion paper was dropped last week, followed by the motion. Now we're back here. Tomorrow is caucus, yet today the government is so anxious to ram this through that it hasn't even given us an opportunity to take it to our caucuses so that when we speak here at this committee, we have a mandate from our caucuses to speak on behalf of our colleagues. They're looking at this in terms of, “We have a majority. We're going to ram it through.”
Take a look at my speech on Bill C-23. It's very similar, because this action is very similar. I say to my colleagues across the way, you can't be feeling good about this, as everybody busies themselves with their notes.
This is not a good day for Liberal promises about committee work and Parliament. At the very least, give us a chance to take it to our caucuses before you start ramming. At least let us do that. Let us check off the box that at least you gave the caucuses a chance to talk before you rammed through your cherry-picked changes to the way our Parliament functions.
With that in mind, Chair, I would move adjournment of this debate to allow us an opportunity to consult with our caucuses.